Via Dolorosa(29)

“I can feel the music,” Claxton mused as the critter buzzed between his dark fingers. “Yeah…yeah…yeah…oh, yeah…”

“That’s amazing,” Nick heard himself say. His own voice sounded very far away.

“All music amazing, crumb,” said Claxton. “Right on.” And he lifted the cicada up to his face. For one horrific moment, Nick thought the jazzman was going to ingest the creature—but at the last second, Claxton, cocking his head back on his neck again, placed the insect directly on the surface of his wide-bridged nose. Slowly, as if not to frighten the insect, Claxton pulled his hand away. It was like watching a balancing act of sorts.

A succession of snapshots exploded behind Nick; he whirled around and was partially blinded by an attacking flashbulb. Isabella, behind the camera, started laughing. She opened her mouth wide when she laughed.

“I should move,” Nick said, stepping out of the semicircle of erected lights. “I should get out of the way.”

“You could never be in the way, Nicholas,” Isabella said. She snapped a single photograph of him. Silver magnolias bloomed before his eyes. “Oh, my broken Nicholas…”

He retreated into darkness. When his eyes fell again on Claxton, the cicada was gone. So were Claxton’s pants. The jazzman had removed all his clothing and stood, now stark naked and as black as a midnight oil slick, across from Nick and half hidden under the darkness of night. The sight jarred Nick; he could only stare and not look away.

All he could say was, “Oh—”

“Step into the light, lovely,” Isabella said. For the briefest moment, Nick thought she was talking to him. But then Claxton, tar-black and with a nearly hairless body, stepped into the center of Isabella’s lights. She began shooting photographs. Claxton did not smile and did not even open his eyes. He moved lithely, sinuously, clasping his hands together at one point and rotating his arms back over his head. His long, dark, sybaritic body seemed to elongate. His black skin was taut over xylophone ribs—his black seal’s body. Hands still up over his head, he pushed his head forward on his neck, his long neck, and managed to lift his right foot off the ground. The leg bent at a curious angle. Claxton’s right foot seemed forever long, his toes like enormous peach-colored pearls. He balanced that way for what seemed like an eternity. There was a strong wind at the crest of the hillside where the three of them stood, but it did not seem to have any influence on Claxton; he remained balancing on one foot, deeply breathing, hardly breathing, his eyes still closed and his wide lips not smiling. Isabella’s flashbulbs exploded over and over again, the light briefly igniting Claxton’s black skin, over and over making him look like a skeleton. In fact, Nick thought he could almost see completely through him each time the flashbulb went off.

Claxton rotated slowly at the waist, his arms still over his head, his right leg still awkwardly bent. For a split second, Nick thought the jazzman was going to lift his left leg, too. And he would have floated in the air—Nick had no doubt.

A ghost, he thought; a phantom.

“You are a beautiful monster,” Isabella whispered. There was a malicious laughter in her voice. She moved in circles, powered by her art, fueled by it, snapping photograph after photograph after photograph. “Nicholas—is he not a beautiful monster?”

Nick only watched as another flashbulb, like a strike of lightning, illuminated the dark nest of pubic hair between Claxton’s legs; the Goat-Man’s genitals—lightning-lit, there and then gone—resembled the neck of a goose.

Suddenly he was dizzy. He felt the world tilt to one side, attempting to shake him off into space. Legs rubbery, he felt himself slide down toward the ground, dumped into the wet grass. He had hardly drank at all and he hadn’t done anything more but inhale the recycled marijuana’s secondhand smoke…yet he felt as though he had been struck severely at the base of his head with a baton, just where his head greeted his neck. In his ears rang the incessant shudder of Isabella’s camera and the din of her laughter. His vision blurred and became pixilated. Looking up, he attempted to lock eyes on Goat-Man Claxton’s stoic form, as the jazzman was the only fixed point he could find at that moment, in an attempt to prevent the world from continuing to spin out of control. But even that did not help. Each time Isabella snapped a photograph, the ghost-like white glow that fell over Claxton’s body was nearly seizure-inducing.

Something happened over in Iraq, was all he could surmise. Some agent has gotten into your brain, into your bloodstream. It is a poison and a ruining agent and something that has been slowly eating away at you since you set foot back on American soil. It is just now showing up. You will die here on this island. You will die here.

It was Myles Granger’s voice.

In his mind’s eye, he saw young Granger as clear as day: his body covered in a yellow powder, his legs soaked a deep brown-black with blood, his face pressed, not moving, into the sand. Around young Granger, the dust was still settling. The greasy, burnt smell of gunfire still clung to the air. And suddenly Nick was no longer on the island and no longer on the hill in the middle of the night—suddenly he was back there in broad daylight, half delirious from the searing pain that coursed up his right arm, his own mouth and throat dry and filled with dust, suddenly not sure if he was dead or alive…and if he was alive, for how much longer? He tried to move—couldn’t. He tried to turn his head and found that, yes, that was all he could do, all he could move. Something was on him. Something had fallen on him. He tried to shift his legs. They shifted. His eyes, though, could not move: he could not remove them from Myles Granger.